The show trial with appropriate confessions of error is a staple of authoritarian regimes. It convinces the masses that they have enemies and frightens the opponents. Have to ensure that “the people” know that life wouldn’t be so hard if all of the external forces and internal enemies would stop attacking.

You really need a confession to convince people that 15-year-olds and 80-year-old deaf and lame goat herders are threats.

They can’t go to regular courts because they don’t have any evidence other than hearsay, rumors, and innuendo. People are going to be really annoyed when they figure out what was done in their name, and just like the Soviet Union, it will happen.

It’s an old act — the Bolsheviks pioneered it in Soviet Russia to scare the populance that the big bad Capitalists were coming and were gonna render every Russian for their fat if the Russian citizenry didn’t redouble their efforts — but as happened in the Soviet Union with the Bolsheviks, it’s getting old. Eventually nobody believed the Soviet propaganda about the mean old Capitalists who wanted to turn the elderly into cat food and so forth, and people are now getting just as wary of the Bushevik propaganda. The only question is whether that wariness is yet to the point where the Busheviks can be driven totally from power…